Bioethics
by Eulalie Moire
Summary: A team of antropologists tries to save the raptors from extinction at the hands of the US and Costa Rican militaries. Grant discovers he has a previously-unknown daughter on the team and makes lots of calls to North America.


_Bioethics_

Eulalie Moire

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing, I make nothing. It's all just for fun.

On arrival, he was taken to the edge of a shallow pit. Liz Kelleher whistled a hog-call down into it, where the only occupant was squatting over what Grant realized were a pile of raptor eggs. She was dressed in khaki cargo pants, a white button-down, and brown boots. He couldn't see her face because of a wide-brimmed straw hat, but felt confident in assigning her gender based solely on the overlarge swag of mosquito netting tied in an equally overlarge bow around the crown of the hat. She tilted her head to the side and raised a hand to the edge of her brim to offer further defense against the sun. While she had a good look at him, Grant still couldn't see her face and was annoyed, thinking she might take the trouble to climb out of her little pit and greet him now that he'd allowed himself to be roped into this scheme and flown all the way down here.

"You're just fucking with me, right?" is what she eventually said.

Beside him, Liz Kelleher made a face. "You said you wanted the best. I got you the best. Anyway, he wasn't on your list of unacceptable candidates, so I don't see the problem."

"He wasn't _on _the list because every time you see him on TV or he's quoted in some article, he's all 'InGen is the devil. Those islands are the devil. The new fake dinosaurs are the devil. I'll never go back there. You can't make me go back there.'"—and here she finished off her impression of Alan with a noise that sounded a lot like a medium-sized dog playing tug-of-war for a bone—"So, really, I couldn't have had the reasonable expectation that he would ever _be_ one of your candidates, acceptable or otherwise. I mean, who's _that much_ of a whore—and for no more than we're paying, besides?"

"Excuse me," Alan cut in sharply, "I certainly didn't come here to be spoken to in this way. Either you need my help or you don't. And if you do, you might start by explaining what's going on here."

The girl in the pit shrugged and got to her feet. Coming up to meet them, she said to Alan, "What're you going to do, though, really? Next boat doesn't leave for six hours."

Alan resented her gross lack of professional courtesy and was opening his mouth to tell her so when she pulled off her hat, exposing a face that was—well, essentially Alan's own. She could not, in fact, have looked much more like him if her face had been rendered by a computer program with instructions to create a feminine image over his own bone structure—complete with blue eyes and sun-bleached brown hair (in braids, like she was Pippy fucking Longstocking). Alan stared at her. She shrugged. "See my problem?—well, that and you're kind of old, which could prove troublesome in case shit happens, which it tends to do around here. Oh, and close your mouth; you look like a fish."

Alan shut his mouth, then licked his lips. His doppelganger gestured back into the pit. "Here, come see the eggs. You can tell us what you think about everything really quickly and then we'll put you back on the boat at six."

Alan nodded and followed her down the slight embankment, mentally running a list of all of his sexual encounters of the last forty years. The girl was at least twenty-five, which put her conception far, far pre-Ellie, back in his Oxford days. More than that, though, he wasn't sure. She didn't look like she'd even had a second genetic contribution.

She turned to face him over the eggs, caught him staring at her, and shrugged. Leaning closer, she murmured , "Anne Bridger, Oxford, skinny, pale blonde…read Renaissance literature, practices astrology, uses phrases like 'harmonious and truly destined union of souls' and such." She raises an eyebrow. Alan, though he is bad with names, does remember the pasty astrologist, though he cannot recall having slept with her more than once or twice. He certainly had had no idea that she had been pregnant. He nodded uncertainly at the girl. "Super," she says, her tone businesslike, "Well, that was Anne and I'm Cate and you're only here for another five hours and fifty minutes, so shall we…?"

"Well, you may be wondering why the nest is somewhere other than where it was the last time you were here. We are too, actually, but we think they moved everything after Dr. Brennan looted their nests from the other site, so…clearly porpoises are going to come flying out of my ears at any moment."

Grant looked up.

Cate shrugged, raising an eyebrow and pursing her lips. "Awkward. Okay, well, your face is pretty much _everywhere_—and my mother is a chatty, chatty woman—so this really isn't the shock for me that it apparently is for you. And frankly, I could have gone a lifetime without running into you like this. So why don't we just look at the dinosaur eggs and then you can just go home—and write me a nice letter saying that they should get to live?"

"Right," Alan said, because of course she would have known who he was and of course she couldn't have missed the resemblance. And she would have to be about thirty, which would make it thirty years that she hadn't made any effort to contact him—and, Alan supposed, at least a few years that she had taken at least some pains to avoid him and avoid his being aware of her existence, a feat which seemed impossible given that she was working with raptors. And because if he could actually make it off of one of InGen's islands just once without chaos ensuing…

"So," she said, "basically, we've found evidence of the raptors' ability to plan and organize—though I believe you're aware of that from your time on the islands. There's also clear evidence of tool and trap making, with which you may also be somewhat familiar. Here we've got their nests, all arranged together in a sort of communal nursery with, we think, a sort of schedule of guardians with each individual sharing responsibility for the entire group's eggs at some point so that the others can go hunting. And there's evidence about a mile away of—not burial grounds, exactly, but a place where they make the effort to drag many of their dead and then offer what appear to be sacrifices of meat…and some human artifacts that they've come across. There's evidence that they place at least a limited value on the individual as well as the group. We found the carcass of an apparently injured female with the bones of prey, which she herself was clearly in no condition to catch, nearby. We reckon the pack was trying to nurse her back to health. Come on, I'll show you."

ooo

"I have a child," Grant says to Ellie by way of a conversation-starter.

"What?"

"I have a child. A thirty-year-old daughter. I slept with a woman—I wouldn't even remember her name if the girl hadn't told me—and she was pregnant and never mentioned it and there's this girl."

Pause. Then, "How do you know this?"

"I met her this afternoon."

Another pause. "Nice, Alan."

On his end, Alan pursed his lips. "Ellie," he said, "please. I didn't know."

"And what would you have done if you had known?"

Silence. "I don't know."

Ellie's turn to be silent, and then, "How did you meet her? In Costa Rica?"

"She's leading the team of anthropologists on Isla Sorna. She…apparently has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard. Ph.D. in archaeology. Specializes in causes, practices, and effects of warfare. She's the one who sent the other girl—Kelleher—to find an expert on real raptors. She wants to know how they're different—she wants to know if humans' genetic manipulation has had any influence on the mental capacity of the raptors, on their social organization, on… Ellie, she thinks they're sentient."

"What do you think, Alan?"

Silence.

"Yeah, I think so, too." Pause. "Ellie, you should see. They offer sacrifices to their dead, they care for their wounded… I don't know. They're more like an alien society than a pack of animals. Yeah, I think they're sentient."

"And…your daughter?"

"She's sentient, too, as best I can tell."

"Alan. You know what I mean. What's she like?"

"She's a smart-ass." Ellie snickered. "She's good at what she does, Ellie. Very good." For Grant, that was pretty much all there was to say.

ooo

Billy is more sympathetic as regards the newly-discovered progeny. "Hell, you barely notice when the power company turns off your lights for nonpayment of bills, why would you notice something small like a pregnant girlfriend?" Snicker.

Alan blushes just a bit. "She wasn't my…_girlfriend_…"

Billy laughs harder. "Player," he says. Alan lets him because he'd let Billy say almost anything.

Billy interrupts the rest of Alan's story. "Wait, so you just walked around the island, just like that? There's really nothing left? Nothing?"

"Nothing," Alan answers, "not on Sorna, anyway. The American military was much more conscientious about this than they have been about others of their campaigns. Every living dinosaur on the island was put down or put into cages, kept tranquilized and under constant armed guard. The place is deserted."

"Hunh," said Billy.

"indeed," said Alan.

"So…if the army has already taken care of the problem, then what does Bridger—your daughter snicker—want with you?"

Alan is quiet. Finally, he says, "There are still raptors left on Isla Nublar. If they can prove the raptors are sentient, the anthropologists want a UN sanction against any further US military action…on grounds that eradicating the raptors would be comparable to genocide."


End file.
